


The Ghost in You

by dollylux



Category: Supernatural RPF
Genre: Anorexia, Bloodplay, Burnplay, Consensual Somnophilia, Cutting, First Love, M/M, Marking, No Lube, Obsessive Behavior, Rape Fantasy, Referenced Molestation, Rough Sex, Self-Harm, Sexual Violence, Straight Razors, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 03:43:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7919215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dollylux/pseuds/dollylux
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The love song of Jared and Daniel.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Ghost in You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Exaggerated_Specificity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Exaggerated_Specificity/gifts), [homo_pink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/homo_pink/gifts), [saltandbyrne](https://archiveofourown.org/users/saltandbyrne/gifts).



> (I cannot beg or stress enough that you need to read the tags for this one. This is a very heavy story with lots of fucked-up shit being done by and to very fucked-up people.)
> 
> Title from The Psychedelic Furs<3
> 
> Takes place immediately following [Unknown Pleasures.](http://archiveofourown.org/collections/Fuckpig_Verse/works/7809784)

Fucking Daniel in Mandy’s dingy half-bath had been exactly like getting married.

Jared is owned now, devoted. Taken and kept. It doesn’t take a single word between them, doesn’t take any hesitant looks or forced conversations. It just was. And it just is.

Erica had dropped them both off at Jared’s house the next morning just after dawn, and they’d crawled through the window into Jared’s room like a crossed threshold, the whole house silent and asleep.

Jared’s throat is tight with emotion, his eyes bright with tears he can’t believe exist as he sits curled and exhausted and unworthy on the bed with Daniel undressing in front of the pale-lit window like a living painting.

He’s so thin it hurts to look at him, hurts to see the protrusion of his hipbones and the ladder-rungs of his ribs and the wire-hanger curve of his collarbone. His nipples are a barely-there pink, his pubes the same ghost-blonde as the hair lanking long and lifeless around his drawn, beautiful face. He’s riddled with scars, with lines thin and thick, some sharp and precise and others shaking and jagged, some still healing, some almost forgotten. 

His eyes are morning-blue and vulnerable in a born-broken way when he finally looks up at Jared, naked as a first breath and starved for more than food.

Jared’s already said I love you, in the heat of the moment and buried in Daniel’s virgin pink. There aren’t words for this, for right now, for what is happening between them.

“C’mere,” he says, his voice low, compensating for how fragile Daniel looks. He tugs off his own clothes while Daniel trembles in place before he makes his way over to the bed, to Jared, his legs skinny and unsure as a fawn. 

Jared keeps his sticky underwear on to communicate that this isn’t That, this isn’t about rutting and getting more ass or an expectation for Daniel to do anything.

The bed barely dips at all when Daniel knees up onto it, already shivering like he’s cold. Jared kicks his covers down and reaches for him, one arm around the so-small of his back and the other cradling the back of his head. He moves them both to curl up on the bed and with each other, the blankets coming up to completely cover their heads, to enclose them in self-made warmth and three layers of soft, soft cotton.

They settle eventually, sharing a pillow with fingers clutching at ribs and in greasy hair, and the sound of their breathing is uneven; deep from Jared and weak from Daniel. 

Their eyes meet and it feels like being found.

Jared thumbs baby angel white hair behind Daniel’s ear before the pad of his thumb strokes along the shell of it, amazed at how soft it is, that he’s touching another person’s ear like it’s a miracle. They search each other’s eyes like a mutual drowning, and when a tear slips from Daniel’s and down into the purple circle under his eye, Jared leans forward to lick it away.

He drinks until Daniel is dry, and his stomach is full of Daniel’s tears and his maiden-blood and his own come. 

Salt and salt and salt.

He draws him in close and tucks Daniel in his arms, keeping him close and safe.

The morning will haunt him for years, will leave him wondering what his life would be like if he’d used words instead of thoughts, if he’d said _you’re mine. You’re mine and you’re safe now_ instead of thinking his eyes spoke for him.

 

Daniel, Jared’s baby bird, his abandoned newborn bunny, his orphan fawn, likes it when it hurts.

He insists on Jared licking his palm instead of lube, begs to be taken like a girl, with no fingers to ease the way, nothing to break up the unspeakable tightness between his shivering thighs. He likes to be fucked until he cries, until he bleeds.

Jared’s conditioned now to having a pink-smeared cock, to tasting blood-and-come together as a single flavor, like strawberries’n’cream. He’s growing fast, getting bigger every day, taller, and the power in his body drives him to use Daniel’s cunt until it blooms, pushed-out and red and begging to be tongue-fucked, to be sucked on and slapped with the flat of Jared’s big hand.

Daniel is an artistic display of Jared’s strength: he’s bruise-purple around the neck in the shape of one large, suffocating hand; he’s punched-pink and sickly yellow around the wrists, lovelied with restraint; he’s smeared with spankprints from the insides of his thighs to the sharp cuts of his cheekbones (and oh, how he’d had to beg for those); and he’s rosy-cunted and whore-soft between his tiny, porcelain asscheeks, always turned out and too loose to hold in the steady stream of pinked come Jared gives him once-twice-three times a day.

They’re inseparable and obsessive, writing frenzied, gasping letters during class and walking with Daniel’s stretched hoodie sleeve tied around Jared’s belt like an obedient lovesick puppy between them, looking for any dark corner where they can be alone for a second and Jared can get his hand down the back of Daniel’s dark patched and pinned jeans and sink his fingers into that hole he loves so much while Daniel nurses on his tongue.

 

\--

 

Out back behind the school after the last bell, sharing a cigarette.

Daniel likes to lick at Jared’s spit left on it because Jared always wraps his lips fully around, getting it nice and soaked as he sucks in tobacco and nicotine and death.

There are other freaks around, tucked into their own corners with their own secrets and favorite songs and drama, all dark, unwashed, and as fragile as Daniel is.

But Daniel has Jared now.

Jared whose hair is getting longer and longer, curling against the cut of his jaw, whose fingers are tender and sliced up from playing the guitar in every spare hour he has.

He had told Daniel last week in a pillow-whisper that he was learning so that he could write songs about Daniel, put music to the words he scratches into the notebook he keeps tucked into his bag.

Daniel flushes warm at the memory and shifts closer to Jared, close enough for their knees to touch.

Jared’s eyes don’t match a single color Daniel’s ever seen before, and his smile is softer than the skin on the inside of his pale wrist that is itching, aching to be marked.

“Do me a favor?” Daniel asks, gently manipulative with the way he bites down on his bottom lip and tries to look like a virgin again.

Jared grunts a reply, pink mouth wrapped around the soggy end of the cigarette and sucking in quick and practiced. Daniel knows by now that Jared is about five seconds from dragging him to the other side of the bleachers and fucking him dry.

Daniel tugs up the sleeve of the flannel shirt he’d borrowed from Jared that he’s absolutely swimming in and turns his arm over, flashing his own wrist, paler than Jared’s but ruined with razor blades and braceleted in fresh bruises, late Christmas gifts from Jared.

“Put that out on me,” he says softly, holding Jared’s eyes as he pushes his arm toward him, an offering.

Jared’s eyes burn into his while the cigarette smolders between his long fingers, the smoke twisting up into the frigid air and into Daniel’s frozen nose.

The reason Daniel loves him is because Jared has never, not once, uttered the words _are you sure_?

Jared’s eyes flick down just for a second, just to line the burning tip of the cigarette over Daniel’s tender wrist, but Daniel doesn’t look away from his face, doesn’t even blink.

They stare at each other, breath held and hearts pounding, when Jared presses the cigarette to Daniel’s skin. The cherry burns white-hot as it scorches him, the smell of singed flesh making Daniel’s stomach rumble hungrily as he swallows hard, his lashes fluttering.

He shivers all over as the pain sets in, and the cigarette is replaced with the flat press of Jared’s thumb, rubbing in the fresh burn and bringing tears to Daniel’s eyes when he digs the tip of his nail into it.

“You’re a fucking dream,” Jared whispers, charging forward and slamming his mouth into Daniel’s, biting into his bottom lip so hard Daniel can’t help but cry out, but go babydoll-limp against the chainlink fence where Jared’s trapped him. 

He finally lets his eyes fall closed as he opens his mouth to be fed on, wanting Jared to devour him from the inside out.

The burn will scar, dissected right down the middle with a straight line left by Jared’s nail, a little Jupiter-shaped present from his only love.

 

\--

 

It takes three months, but the razors finally come out on Valentine’s Day.

Daniel likes to nurse from Jared, to curl up with his head on the jut of Jared’s hipbone and hold the tip of his cock between his lips. It had driven Jared nearly insane at first, had made him hump his hips up and reach for the back of Daniel’s head to guide him, to make him _move_ , but he knows now this isn’t exactly sex, not when it’s like this.

Daniel’s tongue prods at his slit until it’s licked-raw, he suckles like a newborn until Jared’s stab-hard and dripping, until blood is rushing through the fat veins on his cock and his big hands are clenched up in fists at his sides and his eyes are squeezed shut and he doesn’t even let himself breathe just so he can hear the secret, soft sounds of Daniel swallowing his come.

It’s all he eats anymore.

“I would eat you, if I could,” he whispers against Jared’s skin, against his jumpy tummy, his dark pubes. Jared shudders, head tipped heavy back on his neck, Adam’s apple bobbing while he tries to find himself to reply.

“Where would you start?” he asks, his hands numb when they finally unfurl, blood pulsing desperately back into purpled fingers.

“Your cock.” Daniel buries his face into it, into the half-hard, throbbing thick of it, digging out kisses with his dry, flower-pink mouth, licking with his creamy, wiggly tongue. “It would be enough for one day. It would fill me up.”

Jared leaves the obvious joke alone, one side of his mouth tugging up as he sprawls out on the bed, an arm slung over his face. His balls are empty and he’s in love on Valentine’s Day, and there’s no better feeling than this.

“And the next day?”

“Your belly.” Daniel kisses up to it, tonguing Jared’s navel and making him shiver hard, a hand going down into Daniel’s fallen angel hair and petting through the greased tangle. “Just sink my teeth right in--”

Jared hisses when he feels the edge of his teeth, scraping gently, a teasing threat. 

“It’d be so juicy. So warm.”

A kiss to Jared’s hipbone and then there’s movement. He unshields his eyes and finds Daniel curled up beside him, all bones and those pale eyes, all for him.

“Have you ever tasted blood? Not like… when you get a paper cut or something, but. I mean, really tasted it?”

Jared’s caught, can’t look away, and he’s suddenly very aware of how naked he is, how much he loves this boy.

He shakes his head.

Daniel watches him, so still for the longest time, and when he turns away Jared sucks in a breath, only now realizing he’d been holding it.

There’s something being pressed into his hand, something thin and flat that makes him careful when he closes his fingers around it.

A razor blade, like one pried from a Daisy razor, sharp and glinting and virginal, and the sight of it makes Jared’s balls throb, once and hard.

He flicks his eyes back up to find Daniel still watching him, begging Jared to trust, to understand.

“What do you want me to do?” he asks quietly.

 

It had taken a minute, learning about depth and pressure. He’d been shy at first, scared to press too hard, to nick an important artery and have to borrow his big brother’s car to drive them to the emergency room, but he’d gotten it by the end of the first letter.

There, on the impossible thin and pale of Daniel’s inner thigh, is a bloody J.

He’s leaning back against Jared’s headboard, body strangely poised, thighs spread like this is sex. His cock is slim and pretty in pink and bruise-colored at the tip where he makes Jared spank the come out of him, and it’s dripping slick and trembling harder than Jared’s ever seen him.

He glances up from his work, the razor gripped carefully between his fingers, and his mouth is dry when he tries to speak.

“Lick it,” Daniel whispers before he can say anything, the long curve of his foot resting on Jared’s shoulder, exposing the strained muscle, the hollowed dip of his inner thigh where Jared is claiming him.

He dips down, heart racing, and presses a kiss to the head of Daniel’s dick, licking the salt from his lips and working his way down in feather mouth-touches to where Daniel is carved into and dripping impossibly bright red blood.

Metal and salt explodes on Jared’s tongue as he presses it to the first letter of his name, and he sucks in a sharp breath through his nose as he laps at it. Daniel’s breath catches, a stuttered, wounded sound sticking in his throat as he threads a bony hand into Jared’s long hair and keeps him where he is.

“Suck it? P-Please--”

He sobs against his palm when Jared’s mouth starts in on him, tongue pressed flat against the wound between his lips, and he sucks like he’s being fed, like Daniel does from his cock. There’s not much blood there, not enough for any kind of mouthful, and it dilutes in his mouth with saliva and tastes metallic grey going down, like the kind of pink steak his Dad likes.

It makes him strangely hungry, makes him want to sink his teeth right into the meat of Daniel’s thigh and bite down until he can tear away flesh.

He pulls back before the thought can even complete itself in his mind, staring at the suck-welt he’s leaving in his wake, and presses the razor to Daniel’s skin again.

The A goes much more easily, and he learns with each passing letter how to get more and more blood.

Their first and only Valentine’s Day together is traditional: pink and red and white and love.

 

The last time went like this.

 _Thirteenth Step_ thrums on in the background while Jared crowds what belongs to him into the corner of his bed and grinds on top of him, jeans slipping off his slim waist.

_Give this to me._

Daniel is the picture of submission, splayed and flushed-pink all over, his knees up near Jared’s armpits while he eats at Jared’s mouth and lets his hip be the perfect place for Jared to rut his dick against.

“Mine,” Jared growl-mouths along with Maynard, the tip of his nose digging into Daniel’s heated cheek, teeth bared and hovering as he dips his face down to Daniel’s throat, to the blue-veined jump of his pulse, to the shudder-gulp of his Adam’s apple, and he wants. He wants--

“Do it,” Daniel breathes.

 _Mine_ , Maynard snarls.

He sinks his teeth in clean as a wolf and Daniel gasps, body going rigid and strained under him, trying to push him up but Jared is too much, and Daniel is not enough.

He locks his jaw like a predator as he finds his cock between them with rushed fingers, one of his thighs shoving Daniel’s legs wider, knocking him open so he can shift, can nudge and press and--

Daniel cries out, a sharp sob as his hands shove at Jared’s chest, trying so hard to push him off, trying to force the word _no_ out around the spit-bubbled, wordless pleas but Jared just holds on, breaking skin around his perfect white teeth as he roots himself inside of Daniel, pressed so deep he’s surrounded by the pink-tinged throb of Daniel’s heated heartbeat.

This is Daniel’s favorite game, and Jared has gotten really good at playing.

“Stop fighting me,” Jared whispers around the blood burbling against his tongue, that is staining his teeth and flooding his mouth like he’d used a razor instead of his teeth. He gathers the weak wings of Daniel’s hands and pins them to the corner of the mattress that he’d recently taken off the frame and put on the floor to dampen the secret sounds of their incessant fucking.

Daniel stretches out like Saint Sebastian, begging for arrows and struggling against the way Jared’s got him pinned like a luna moth to the already bloody bedsheet with his hips and his hands. Jared’s free hand is his right one, and when he hauls back and slaps Daniel across the face, sudden and cruel, his panting, silent mouth starts to trickle a grateful red.

“Take it,” Jared croons as he leans back in, lapping and smearing blood on Daniel’s neck, giving it a parting kiss before moving down to the juncture of neck and shoulder, a place that’s so tender looking on Daniel, already mottled with fading bitemarks and bruises. It’s a precious place, as sacred as the place where thigh meets ass, but Jared sinks his teeth in like it’s his right to ruin.

He’s mindlessly fucking him, pumping his dick in with vicious curls of his hips, wanting to hiss at the dry drag but it’s turned into part of the ritual, part of the bloody religion they’ve made together. He lets go of Daniel’s hands to press one flat against his neck, cutting off his air while the other threads into the ghost-white of his hair and pulls, hard.

Daniel’s sharpened nails dig into his back and rake down, drawing blood to lick up later, to seep into Jared’s one nice dress shirt while he’s sitting in the pew at church with his family in a couple of hours. 

Jared growls and presses down harder on his neck, the heel of his hand sinking into the delicate curve over his heartbeat, and he knows if he’s not real, real careful he could break his neck, snap it like a bird.

The reminder of power makes him draw out his thrusts, fucking so hard he can feel the wetness of blood where Daniel is forced open around him, where Jared is battering his already torn insides.

Daniel’s eyes roll back in his head, stark white against the choke-red of his face and his translucent eyelashes, and he shudders violently under Jared, letting out a final, pushed sigh as he comes between their sweat-slap bellies and passes out, heavy and limp now under Jared’s rutting body.

Jared glances over at the open laptop on the nightstand, at the live feed of what the camera is recording. He stares right into the camera and licks his lips, blood dripping from his chin as he holds Daniel’s future-eyes and gives a thick-blooded _fuck_ into his unconscious body.

This. This is what Daniel wanted to see. To save. To keep.

Jared reaches down for Daniel’s thin thighs, so heavy without Daniel awake and helping their movement, and pushes them up toward his visible ribs. He can see the slightest flash of red on the screen between Daniel’s legs, seeping out around Jared’s cock, and the sight of it makes him shiver hard, makes him turn from the screen to focus on the fainted boy beneath him.

_“Fuck me like I’m dead,” Daniel had whispered in Jeff’s backseat on the way home Friday after school, his talented, skeletal hand working miracles on Jared’s cock in his jeans. “Fuck me like it doesn’t matter what happens to my body.”_

He does, fucks into his limp body just like that, and when he comes he strains forward hard, trying to shove himself in even deeper, to inflict as much violence as he can, to make sure Daniel has enough bruises to get him through the week Jared’s going to be gone for spring break with his family.

He couldn’t do it, wouldn’t do it, if he didn’t love him.

 

\--

 

There’s nothing to heal into if you’re born twisted. Good people, people like Jared, can be broken by things. Sometimes a little thing, or a series of little things; small fissures that can lead to a bigger break, but those kinds of things can heal, can meld back together and maybe Jared can be whole--if not wholly the same--again.

But people like Daniel, there’s no hope for them. No hope for him. He’s known it his whole life. Known it since he watched his mama fuck for drug money from his playpen, known it since he lit the little neighbor girl's Barbies on fire and pressed their flaming, melting hair to the bottom of his four-year-old foot. He’s known it since he let his fourth grade science teacher suck on his tiny dick and push his chalk-dry fingers inside of his unpried, grade school asshole just for letting him stay late after school while he waited for his mama to pick him up.

Nothing made him that way, he’s sure of it. He can’t recall ever feeling different than this. Which is why he knows he’s not meant to live, not really. Not with the good, regular people. Not with those poor, precious ones who try to help him, try to fix him, try to make him happy.

Not with Jared, no matter how much his tired, broken body wants it.

“Please eat,” Jared whispers, plaintive as a mother and dedicated as a husband. There are tears in his thunderstorm eyes, and the plate he has clutched in his hands, piled with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and carrot sticks, is trembling. “Just something little?”

Daniel watches him with soft eyes, too weak to really move at this point and too uncaring to look at anything but Jared in the first place.

 _But I’m finally almost beautiful_ , the shaky push of his breath says. _Almost beautiful enough for you._

His fingertips are icy cold and bluish, and they twitch when Jared’s warmth covers them, bleeds into him like a life-force.

 _No_ , he wants to protest. _You keep it._

He doesn’t move when Jared starts to cry, doesn’t do anything but stare at the ceiling, at the black mold in the corner, creeping out like silent, deadly fingers.

 _I’m down here_ , his eyes say to it. Jared’s tears soak into his jutting collarbone, into his hair that’s started falling out by the handful. _Please hurry._

“I love you,” Jared whispers, burning hot lips pressed to his smooth, cold cheek, over and over and over. Stubborn and young and ignorant.

“I’m so sorry about that,” Daniel manages to breathe against the thick fall of Jared’s hair covering his face, smothering him.

Jared had only been gone for six days, seven nights. Daniel had been truly lost without him.

 

The hospital is always so cold.

It doesn’t make any sense, making some place with starved-to-deaths piled into beds with thin sheets as cold as ice, but there’s no escaping it. 

Daniel shivers in his bed with six layers of blankets piled on top of him, staring across the room at Annie, his newest neighbor with a gap between her thighs that Daniel would kill for.

He wants a cigarette, can feel the ghost of one between his fingers, can taste the phantom bitterness of tobacco on his tongue, but smoking’s not allowed here, not anywhere on the premises.

He jerks at the tubes attaching him to the dripping bags framing his bed, giving him medicine and nutrients and all kinds of delicious things to keep him alive, to get him strong enough to sit up on his own again.

It had been awhile since he’d gotten this bad, and the first time since he left Georgia for good. It’s fucked up, but he can’t help but blame Jared. If he hadn’t gone and made Daniel love him and then up and left like he did for Florida, he wouldn’t be here. He wouldn’t have needed to do this.

Jared’s flannel shirt is wrapped around him almost twice, like a long-armed hug, and he tucks his face down into the warmth of it and breathes in the fading scent of his boyfriend, his one tether to any kind of reality.

Two hours and twenty-one minutes, and he’ll be here. 

Every single day is just the same, the repetition of his schedule enough to make him want to roll his bed out the window and shatter his barely-living piece of shit self on the concrete below.

But every time it gets to be too much, just when he starts to dig his trimmed-short nails into his paper thin skin and rip, Jared’s there, an answered prayer in Daniel’s own disintegrating hoodie with tear-bloated eyes and a watery smile.

Every day, without fail.

On the thirty-fifth day, Daniel is told with trembling excitement by one of the nurses that he’s gained _eleven_ pounds. He stands with fat-thighed legs in front of her and just stares blankly, that number not computing, not _possible_.

Eleven pounds. Eleven pounds of fat, on his body.

Jared’s kiss is gasping and beaming when it finds his sleeping mouth that afternoon.

He’d heard.

“That’s great, love,” he says, grinning so white and showing Daniel so much teeth that every inch of his body aches with the ghost-memory of the exquisite pain they can inflict. “You can get out of here soon. The doctor said if you get up to a hundred pounds that--”

“Don’t.”

He slaps a hand over Jared’s that is dragging the covers back, the fleshy bulk of Daniel’s body in his ugly sweats revealed to the world, to Jared’s beautiful eyes.

He looks up at Jared from under his lashes, his heart racing while Jared searches his eyes, confused and trying not to be hurt.

“Don’t…” Jared echoes, looking between their hands and Daniel’s face, trying so hard to understand. “Don’t what? I’m--”

“Don’t look at me.”

He can barely say it before the shame creeps in and closes up his throat. He turns in his twin bed and feels the padding of fat that separates his hipbone from the shitty mattress. Tears burn in his eyes even though he’s told Jared before that he doesn’t cry.

He didn’t do a lot of things before Jared.

“Baby.” Jared sounds absolutely heartbroken, the familiar tug of his fingers brushing back Daniel’s hair giving him comfort he doesn’t deserve. “What’s wrong? Did I do something? Hey--”

“Don’t touch me,” he whispers, clutching his blankets and squeezing his eyes shut. The room is too bright, it’s too early in the afternoon, he’s already eaten two meals today, and Jared has hours to be here still. Everything is all wrong, is irrevocably wrong. 

There’s a weight on the bed behind him and then the long warmth of Jared’s body curling in, wrapping around him, his kissing mouth leaving love on the back of Daniel’s neck. He shudders outright, recoiling until he’s clinging to the edge of the bed and he’s as stiff as a corpse.

“I said _don’t touch me_ ,” he snaps, curling in over himself, shoulders hunched up when Jared tries to touch his face. “I’m ugly. I-I’m… go away. Get away from me.”

Jared knows the difference between their version of _no_ and the one that Daniel is giving him right now, because he listens this time.

The bed is one person lighter in seconds, all the warmth gone. Daniel bites down on his tongue hard enough to draw blood, and the taste of it grounds him, the pain giving him something to focus on while Jared stares silently at his back and breaks his fucking heart.

“I’m sorry,” Jared finally offers, so soft that it hurts worse than a scream, like a layer of skin being sliced off. “I love you.”

It’s too much. It’s exactly what Daniel wants and it’s too much, more than he has ever deserved and something absolutely he doesn’t deserve anymore. Not anymore.

“I’ve never really loved you,” he replies calmly, slicing clean through to Jared’s heart, quick and precise as a surgeon. The silence that follows is stunned, the sound of a hand on a doorknob. It’s a second to last breath.

He holds his own and waits.

Seventeen horrific seconds later, Jared moves.

The door closes and the quiet that settles in is absolute.

He’s alone now, and it’s what he deserves.

 

The pills make his handwriting shaky, the words spidery and brittle, but they find their way to the page, fill it until he can’t hold the pen anymore.

He drops it and settles back in the bath, his head lolling to the side as he stares at the grimy wall, the blackened tile, the millipede crawling up towards the dirty window. The water is already cold and he hasn’t even started.

The text at least is typed out and ready to go, and he reaches over for his phone and presses send, a single word slipping onto the screen to Jared:

_goodbye_

He fumbles with the razorblade on the toilet next to the note and his phone, slicing into his finger as he tries to pick it up. He gets a numb-fingered grip on it and props his left arm wrist-up on his bent knee.

He thinks somewhere in the back of his mind he should be second-guessing this, should be talking himself out of it, but all he can feel is relief, all he can think is _finally._

Maybe it’s his medicated, heavy hand, but the blade sinks right in, buried deep immediately. His lips draw back, teeth bared and gritted as he presses down hard and drags straight down, slicing right into the vein, drawing up blood so red it’s nearly black.

The right arm is harder, his fingers slippery with blood now, hand shaky with how weak he already feels, and he can’t watch now, can’t even look. Just presses in as hard as he can and drags and drags over and over, tearing up his arm until the razor slips from his grip and into the red water.

There. It’s finally done.

His eyes close, and a relieved, weak sigh leaves his pale lips.

 

“Daniel? Daniel! Ohmygod, baby. My sweet baby, god no. Fuck, no. Please. Daniel. Daniel!”

The words feel like they’re being called up from a memory, like they’re swimming along in thick water at the back of his head, but the faint sharpness of a palm on his face stirs him, makes his lashes flutter, eyes opening in slits.

Jared is there beside him, tear-streaked and shaken, so pale, more beautiful than Daniel ever had a right to touch, to know, to be loved by.

Daniel has only ever been good at ruin, at breaking things to fit in his hands, in the hollow, needy cavity of his chest. Jared’s meant for more than that, for more than nestling in Daniel’s ribs.

He’s gotta let him go.

Jared’s mouth is bloody now, and Daniel feels the faint tug of his arms being lifted. Jared is kissing his hands, is nuzzling into them, smearing blood on his tear-streaked face, on that sweet nose of his.

 _I’m sorry_ , he wants to say. _I’m sorry for all the blood._

He’s being kissed now, being licked into, gasped words spilled into his mouth like they’re medicine, like they can fix him. Like a goodbye.

It’s beautiful, he thinks. Dying like this. Being so loved. Being kissed so sweetly.

He feels the edge of his mouth tug up into a smile just as his eyes slip closed and he draws in his very last breath, and the sound that leaves him is the quietest sigh.

_Jared._

 

\--

 

“You almost done in here?”

Jared looks up at Daniel’s uncle Ed standing in the doorway of Daniel’s room, like he’s afraid to step inside. Like he’ll catch death if he does.

Jared doesn’t even know how to fake smiles anymore.

“Almost,” he says.

Ed hovers for a few more seconds and disappears, leaving the door cracked.

Jared turns back to the room, to the box of things he’s collected, kept for himself: the black hoodie, the razorblade that had killed him, the picture of Daniel in the fourth grade back in Georgia (hair soft against his cheeks, shy eyes on the camera), the nearly empty pack of cigarettes from Daniel’s nightstand, the yellowed, time-bloated copy of _Lost Souls_ by Poppy Z. Brite that he always had in his bag, and the burned copy of their last fuck on DVD, tucked into A Perfect Circle’s CD case.

Remnants of a boy. All he has left. They’d buried him this morning back in Georgia, put him in the ground to rot and be eat soft by dark, slithery things until he’s nothing but bones, just the way he would’ve liked. 

Jared had tucked his own flannel shirt into the casket before they'd sealed it to send him home, the one washed thin and faded that Daniel had loved the most. He’d pushed it under his rigid, cold body while he leaned down and kissed him full on the mouth, immediately and irrevocably haunted by the lifeless taste of him.

He stands up with his box and hugs it to his chest, staring out at the obliviously bright day with far-off, dead eyes.

The world will never look the same. And this break will not heal, not for a very, very long time.

 

The bus is empty, and the alien quiet of it after the bursting chaos of the show makes Jared almost feel nauseous.

He paces around in the small living space, streetlights gleaming in through the windshield providing the only light inside. The crowd outside is restless and excited, most of them happy about the fact that Momo and Adrianne have decided to join them for awhile.

Jared’s eyes jump through the first dozen or so kids along the front of the crowd, having to force himself not to look at a certain one too fast.

He’s used to it by now, after five shows. Used to looking at him, to watching him but looking away after only a few seconds. Can’t stare, can’t ogle. Cannot flirt.

He doesn’t realize he’s holding his breath until he finally, finally lets his strained eyes stop on him, on that crushed, lonely boy at the far end of the group by himself. 

Adrianne had told him that the boy’s got words tramp stamped onto his back, something still scabbed and healing with the word _Daddy_ in it. Jeff had told him that the boy smells good, like clean sweat and baby lotion, smells like his pussy is bare and silk-soft. That he’s got the greenest eyes he’s ever seen and got somebody else’s bruises on his neck, on his hips.

Jason had told him last night that his name is Jensen. 

Jensen is staring at the bus, looking straight and steady like he can see Jared, can see through the shadows inside and find him.

He’s beautiful, the kind of beautiful that’s meant for the backs of eyelids, the kind of beautiful that makes Jared hate himself because surely this kid is in fucking middle school, surely he’s still using no. 2 pencils and going to school dances and doesn’t even have a permit yet.

He’s gotta be a kid, wrists that small, face that soft. But it doesn’t stop Jared’s dick from straining against his pants, doesn’t stop him from reaching down to massage it into an even thicker mess while he watches him, watches that boy’s heart break again with the disappointment that Jared is still ignoring him.

His draw to Jensen is inexplicable, is nearly constant and terrifying and bordering on an obsession at this point.

He reaches into his pants when Jensen wraps his arms around himself, unknowingly flashing a jut of hipbone, a smooth slip of creamy belly. He wraps a hand around his dick and sinks down into the driver’s seat, leaning back to hide in the shadows, his eyes never leaving Jensen, his breath falling low and deep as he jacks his big needy cock.

 _Last time_ , he says to himself as his legs splay, forefinger playing with the heavy metal of his piercing, flicking at his slit. _Last fucking time. Tomorrow, you forget about him._

“Tomorrow,” Jared promises, sliding a hand up his shirt to pinch at his nipple, eyes on Jensen’s glossed, broken-hearted boymouth, heart slamming with lust and fondness and deeply embedded fear.


End file.
